The problem of e-waste: Between the breakneck pace of technological progress and our voracious appetite for gadgets, we're accumulating piles of obsolete computers, cell phones, and other electronic junk. This stuff is hard to dispose of because it's full of many different materials and tends to contain toxins like mercury, lead, and arsenic. This junk is often shipped overseas where it's "recycled" with very little oversight and becomes an environmental and public health disaster.

Anyone who spends any time at all online knows how easy it is to waste that time on sites one might call the online equivalent of junk food. We wander from site to site wasting time on places like Facebook and Twitter all day long. Now there's a site that hopes to turn that wasted time into something good while also giving users an incentive to waste less in the future.

Re-purposing objects, recycled and/or found, can be a tricky business. Making objects that are as aesthetically appealing and functional as the aforementioned Hangelier isnít simply a matter of gleaning trash from laneways. Waste is the most abundant local resource our cities have to offer. Often free or inexpensive, waste is a seemingly endless supply, always providing new and exciting design possibilities.

Finding a convenient, healthy snack can be difficult in workplaces and schools where fruit trees are long gone and the best on offer now comes from a vending machine stuffed with junk. In this troubled economic times, many schools are forced to shut down their cafeteria services and replace them with rows of vending machines.

Our gadgets will eventually break or get replaced. But it's hard to know just what to do with the gadgets that get left behind. Some people stuff them in junk drawers. Most people won't simply junk their car -- they'd trade it in. Why can't that same school of thought apply to electronics?

As one of Tel Avivís most thought-provoking new companies, Junktion is a young, edgy and innovative design studio, is breathing new life into the trash the city has cast aside. The company began in 2008 and has made their presence know in the contemporary furniture market with their unique approach to function and unwavering conviction to challenge how people regard junk.

Junk hauling may sound like a questionable product to sell: it assumes that people will pay to get rid of ratty sofas and assorted items in professional and socially conscious ways. Almost every house has an excess of junk which often fills the garage, every closet in the house, the attic, storage sheds, basement, and what was supposed to be the guest bedroom. People spend a lot of money every month renting storage spaces across town to store the junk they do not have room for. If you want to earn big cash, and help rescue others from under the dusty thumb of junk, consider starting a junk hauling business. You can make a lot of money doing this, both upfront money, and money on the back end.

In the last 50 years, human beings have launched thousands of artificial satellites into space. When one of these stops working, it usually falls back toward the Earth and burns up in the atmosphere. Satellites at high altitudes, however, sometimes remain in Earthís orbit. Later, they may fall apart or explode into thousands of smaller pieces. The higher the satellite, the longer it stays in orbit, and the more likely it is to break apart. The pieces may stay in orbit for years, decades or even centuries.

Junk mail is advertising of one sort or another that arrives in your postal mailbox along with the mail you really want or need. It's impossible to eliminate all of it.†They're ugly and a waste of ink and paper and we toss them in the trash at the first chance (some 4 million tons, nearly half of which is never opened).
Even if you recycle there are still enormous environmental costs in terms of ink, energy to produce, deliver and recycle the paper.

Product designer Ryan Frank is a perfect example of creating furniture from junk. Working out of his studio in east London, he salvages wasted surfaces such as old wood, industrial hooks, burlap bags and even tagged surfaces and morphs them into stunning home products and furniture.